Reflecting upon the loss I have sustained in the death of my dear Dall, you exclaim, "How difficult it is to realize that life has become eternity, hope is become certainty! How strange, how impossible, it seems to conceive a state of existence without expectation, and where all is fulfillment!" I have marked under the word "_impossible_," because such a belief is literally impossible to my mind; the sense of activity, of desire for, and aiming at, and striving after something better than what I am, is so essential a portion of the idea of happiness to me that I absolutely can conceive of no happiness but in the attempt at, and consciousness of, progress. The state where that hope did not exist, and where the spiritual energies were not presented with deeper and higher objects of attainment, would be no state of enjoyment to me. I cannot imagine heaven without inexhaustible means of increasing knowledge and excellence.... Perhaps in that state, dear Emily, we shall be able to find out how a mummy of the days of Memnon should have preserved in its dead grasp a living germ for 3000 years.... [This last sentence referred to a striking fact, which Miss Fitz Hugh's uncle, Mr. William Hamilton, told us, of a bulb found in the sarcophagus of a mummy, which was planted, and actually began to germinate and grow.] BRANCHTOWN, May 27th, 1835. MY DEAREST H----, ... It is curious that in a comparatively inactive state of life, the sense of the infinite business _of living_ has become far more vivid to me than it ever was before; existence seems so abounding in duties, in objects of interest and energy, in means of excellence and pleasure--happiness, I ought rather to say,--the immense and important happiness of constant endeavor after improvement.... Dear H----, my letter was interrupted here yesterday by a visitor. I will join my thread, and go on with a few words which I have this moment read in Hayward's Appendix to Goethe's "Faust." When Goethe had to bear the death of his only son, he wrote to Zelter thus: "Here then can _the mighty conception of duty_ alone hold us erect--I have no other care than to keep myself in equipoise. The body _must_, the spirit _will_, and he who sees a necessary path prescribed to his will has no need to ponder much." The first part of this is noble; but I am not going to do what I used to quarrel so much with you for doing--fill my letters with quotations, or even make disquisitions of them; at any rate, till I have answered your last.